The downside of winning a championship

After your team wins a championship, owners can lose interest and management can get lazy.

The Chicago Bulls' six championships in the 1990s, led by Michael Jordan, led to years of hoops futility in Windy City.

By:Kevin McGranSports Reporter, Published on Sat Jun 11 2011

Either the Vancouver Canucks or the Boston Bruins are going to drop the words “long suffering” from their vocabulary.

In Boston’s case, the Bruins have to go back to 1972 to find their last Stanley Cup championship. The Canucks have never won the Cup, but have made it to the finals three times since their inception in 1971.

For one of these teams, the drought is going to end.

For the franchise, it means glory. For the fans, it means euphoria. For the front office, it’s validation that every move, every decision that led to this moment was the correct one.

For the business of the team, well in the short term, it’s fantastic — new fans, inflated TV ratings, merchandise sales. If they’re smart, they’ll lock in sponsors at inflated rates to long-term deals.

But in the long term, there’s evidence to suggest winning the championship is bad for business. Ownership can lose interest, or sell. Management can get lazy.

“It’s like collecting,” said Detlev Zwick, associate professor of marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University. “The collector is enthralled with collecting, as long as the collection is not complete. As soon as the collection is complete, the collection loses its magical power.

“A complete collection is the worst thing that can happen.”

Take the curious case of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Toronto Maple Leafs. They may well prove it’s the chase of the championship — the longer the pursuit the better — that sells. But after you win the championship, anything less is losing.

For a spell, from about 1985 to 1993, the Blue Jays were at least on a par with the Maple Leafs in terms of popularity in Toronto. If you said in 1992 the Blue Jays were more popular than the Maple Leafs, you wouldn’t have lost a bar fight.

The Jays’ pursuit of baseball glory had this city on edge. They got close to the World Series in 1985 (AL East champs), ’87 (collapsed in last week of season), and ’89 and ’91 (AL East champs). They sold out the 50,000-seat SkyDome on a regular basis, and then they won it all in 1992 and 1993.

By 1995, the team had been sold, the stars dispersed and a strike/lockout deflated the fan base. There were empty seats at the ’Dome. Within a decade, the team was an afterthought — for diehards only.

The Maple Leafs, meanwhile, made it only as far as the conference final four times since the Jays won the World Series. A Stanley Cup parade hasn’t been planned in these parts since 1967. It’s a team that hasn’t made the playoffs since 2004, yet dominates the sports landscape with sold-out games and absurdly high TV ratings.

The examples aren’t limited to the Blue Jays. Consider the Islanders’ wasted legacy after winning four straight Stanley Cups from 1980-’83.

And through a change of ownership, the Tampa Bay Lightning squandered their goodwill following their 2004 Stanley Cup. Only through another change to committed owners have the Lightning begun to win back their fans.

In baseball, fans lost interest in Florida and Arizona after their World Series wins. Ditto in basketball in Chicago with the Bulls after the Michael Jordan era.

“When you constantly win, you get used to winning, and it can lead to a little bit of boredom,” said Ben Sturner, CEO of the sports marketing firm Leverage Agency, based in New York City. “The pursuit of victory and the struggle to get there makes it exciting. And people can identify a lot more with trying to make it.”

Sturner himself is a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan who actually lost interest when the Braves rose to perennial contender status in the 1990s. They won the World Series in 1995. After that, fans became so used to the team being in the playoffs, they didn’t bother to buy tickets to the early rounds. In 2004, the team had to give away tickets to the playoffs.

“Winning is never bad,” said Tom Anselmi, executive vice-president of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment. “In sports, it’s what it’s all about.

“Any time you get to the top of the hill, there’s only one place to go and that’s down. So you can never be complacent. You can’t take anything for granted. You always need to be working hard on your place in the community. And the pursuit is always to win.”

There are obvious exceptions, such as the New York Yankees and Manchester United — teams with a history of winning that can pay top dollar (or pound) to outbid their closest rivals for the world’s top athletes, continue to win and have an ever-growing fan base.

Before the NHL introduced the salary cap, you might want to throw the Montreal Canadiens in that group. These days the Habs — as popular as ever — are constricted by the salary cap that promotes parity and constricts teams from creating dynasties. The Chicago Blackhawks had to get rid of many of their key players from their 2010 Stanley Cup team because they simply couldn’t afford them.

Still, the experts say, winning sells.

“When you’re winning championships, you get a bigger fan base because you’re attracting people who might not be fans to become fans of your team,” said Sturner. “You want to root for a champion. You want to go to winners. You want to be associated with champions.”

Zwick says a championship brings in new fans.

“There might be something of a climax and a post-climax letdown: ‘Now we’ve done it, what’s next?’” said Zwick. “But championships tend to build and foster another generation of fans. Younger fans might get on the elevator of fan-dome, start watching the games on TV, getting into the players, then start to buy tickets.

“I would never say no to winning a championship.”

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